L
arian Studios always goes all-in. After
nearly bankrupting itself to make Divinity:
Original Sin in 2 015, Larian tripled in size
to pull off an ambitious sequel, growing to
150 developers. With one of the best RPGs
of the decade under its belt, Larian then set out to
make Baldur’s Gate III. A year in pre-production let
them make a call on how much work this even more
ambitious game would take. “We thought we had it all
figured out. We even estimated how big we’d have to
become,” said Larian founder Swen Vincke.
They were wrong. “I never expected us to be 400 people
to make Baldur’s Gate III,” Vincke told me. “Nobody
expected it. But it’s literally what we needed to do it.”
Appropriately for an RPG studio that was deeply
committed to player choices leading down dramatically
diverging paths, Larian found itself at a crossroads after
launching Baldur’s Gate III into Early Access in 2 020.
“We thought we understood what we needed to do to
make this game,” Vincke said. “Then we actually really
understood. And so we had two choices: we could scale
it down, or we could scale ourselves up. And so we
chose to scale ourselves up.”
It was the only real option to make Baldur’s Gate III
what Vincke wants it to be, “The benchmark incarnation
of D&D 5 th Edition in a videogame.” With 400
developers now spread across seven studios, located in
Belgium, Ireland, England, Spain, Canada and Malaysia,
Larian is nearly ten times the size it was in 2014 making
Original Sin. Cinematics were a huge complicating factor
that affected everything in the game, even dramatically
impacting the writing process. On Original Sin II, the
writers could tinker with text until essentially the last
minute, thanks to an automated pipeline they built that
would send new text straight to the recording studios for
actors to record the next day. But that doesn’t work
when every dialogue scene is meticulously animated –
writing has gone from one of the final steps in the
process to one of the first.
“There are so many steps in-between now, so many
people that need to look at it,” Vincke explained.
“Cinematic designers, cinematic animators, the casting
director, lighting, VFX, SFX. So you don’t just add a line
like that anymore. You’re very aware of your cinematic
budget, the cost, and the waterfall that follows from it.
We’ve had to reinvent ourselves, how we work... so
that we can still iterate.”SIN CITY
This kind of growth is risky, even with a licence as big as
D&D. Larian spent years as a tiny RPG studio just barelyLoaded
dice
“We wanted
failure to be its
own reward, so
that if you failed
you should
continue like you
do with a good
DM,” Vincke said.
“We built all
these cinematic
moments to
react if you fail,
but the majority
just want to
succeed ontheir
die roll and are
just going to save
scum.”After
some intense
feedback, Larian
tweaked the RNG
to favour players.GOING BIG
How LARIAN STUDIOS tripled in size to make Baldur’s Gate IIISomething even bigger
could be on the horizon- but what?